APECS Webinars

The Arctic Research Icebreaker Consortium (ARICE) and APECS invited for a webinar on “Are we losing a sink for atmospheric trace gases?: Nitrous oxide in the Arctic marine ecosystem” on 28 February 2022 from 13:00 – 14:00 pm GMT

The ARICE-funded project "TRace gAses Cycling in the Arctic marine Ecosystem (TRACE)" focused on the biogeochemical cycling of climate-relevant atmospheric trace gases at the sea-air and sea-ice interfaces in the Arctic Ocean. During this webinar we will focus on nitrous oxide (N2O), which is a potent greenhouse gas and currently the most important ozone-depleting compound in the stratosphere. Although the ocean is generally acknowledged as an overall source of N2O, at regional and basin-scales there is a large range of variability in terms of its sources and sinks, which in turn, poses challenges to the accurate assessment of its role on the marine nitrogen cycle. Environmental changes such as warming and decrease in sea ice coverage are expected to affect production/consumption pathways of N2O, but the direction of the future trends is highly uncertain. We conducted a thorough survey of N2O across the sea-ice-air interfaces within the context of the ODEN expedition in 2021, as a contribution to the Synoptic Arctic Survey. In the first part of the webinar we will briefly introduce the project and a short narrative of its development. Then we will present a few impressions of the trace gas work conducted below, within and above sea ice, as well some of the preliminary results of the expedition.